"I have it!" I cried. "You have an attack of veritable 'Whitmania,' arising from a too long indulgence in the intoxicating yet enervating flow of Swinburnian superlatives?"
"The deuce a bit of it," he snapped, testily.
I was growing impatient, and inclined "to give it up."
"Oh! this is worse than Argyll on Political Economy, or a Double Acrostic!" I grumbled, angrily. "What in the name of Eleusis have you been up to?"
"Listen!" he whispered, placing his lips close to my ears; "listen, and marvel if you may; aid me if you can. I have been trying, by a comparison of the comments thereupon in the various party papers, to understand the real significance of a Bye-Election!!!"
"Miserable man!" I gasped, "that way indeed Madness lies. Know you not that human imbecility in those identical comments reaches its absolutely 'lowest deep' of abject folly and crazy inconsequence. Know you not that nothing—positively nothing in the whole history of this crack-brained world—is so mad and so maddening as a Tory article on a bye-election won by a Liberal, or a Liberal article on a bye-election gained by a Tory? Know you not that in these dismally, delirious lucubrations, all the rules of arithmetic, all the laws of logic, all the palpable bearings of facts, all the obvious meanings of words, to say nothing of the dictates of veracity, and the impulse of fairness, are deliberately inverted, perverted, played moral havoc and intellectual pitch-and-toss with? Know you not that the gibberings of Bedlam are clear and continent sense compared with the argufyings of a party-scribe 'explaining away' an opponent's success, or picturing an ally's crushing defeat as a 'moral victory?' Know you not that the (supposed) necessity of penning such frantic fustian makes a Tory Thunderer drivel like a drunken Thersites, and a Radical Rhadamanthus equivocate like a pettifogging attorney? Know you not——?"
But with a howl of horror the wretched victim of party silliness and factious sophistry pitched head-first amidst the pile of papers—MAD!!!
Laissez-Faire.
"I believe, if you would let alone this unhappy peasantry, there would be no difficulty whatever."—Mr. Balfour, on the Irish Question.